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Good lord. Behold a review that’s meant to be glowing which confirms everything I was afraid of regarding the new Emily Bronte movie. Charlotte bashing! (There’s no “perhaps unfairly” about it, Bradshaw, if this movie villainizes Charlotte into a jealous mean girl, err, woman, it’s unfair. The biggest argument she and Emily ever had was about Charlotte wanting Emily to publish precisely because she thought Emily’s poetry rocked.). Anne marginalisation! Seriously, any movie that’s supposed to be about Emily Bronte and ignores the relationship with Anne was the central (human) one in her entire life both as a writer and a person completely ignores what few solid facts we know about Emily Bronte and therefore is not about Emily Bronte. At all.
…aaaand we get lots of sex with the Reverend Willy Weightman, who is driven “nearly mad” by his (entirely fictional) relationship with Emily? And somehow this inspires Wuthering Heights? Argh. It’s my least favourite kind of movie about a female writer, it seems, where she’s squeezed into some (watered down) version of the plot pop culture has osmosed about her most famous work. (See also: most stuff featuring Jane Austen as a character, with the glorious exception of Miss Austen Regrets.)
….Yes, it looks like the only actual fact which made it into this film is that Branwell was friends with Willy Weightman. (In rl they were friendly enough for Branwell to be at his death bed; Emily and Charlotte were in Brussels at the time, studying French with Monsieur Heger, and Anne was working as a teacher at Thorpe Green.)
As for reviewer Peter Bradshaw’s speculation Ted Hughes would have loved one particular scene in this movie (not a romantic one): mayyyyyybe, he was into that, but otoh he grew up near Haworth and had enough Bronte opionions of his own to write a poem about Emily (which ships Emily/the Wind, not Emily/a guy) and reference Emily in a poem about Sylvia Plath, so I am really not convinced he’d have liked this film. The script of which sounds as if it was written by Mr. Lockwood, based on his so very insightful inititial assumptions about the people at Wuthering Heights, and with this Wuthering Heights joke, I am ending this rant.
…aaaand we get lots of sex with the Reverend Willy Weightman, who is driven “nearly mad” by his (entirely fictional) relationship with Emily? And somehow this inspires Wuthering Heights? Argh. It’s my least favourite kind of movie about a female writer, it seems, where she’s squeezed into some (watered down) version of the plot pop culture has osmosed about her most famous work. (See also: most stuff featuring Jane Austen as a character, with the glorious exception of Miss Austen Regrets.)
….Yes, it looks like the only actual fact which made it into this film is that Branwell was friends with Willy Weightman. (In rl they were friendly enough for Branwell to be at his death bed; Emily and Charlotte were in Brussels at the time, studying French with Monsieur Heger, and Anne was working as a teacher at Thorpe Green.)
As for reviewer Peter Bradshaw’s speculation Ted Hughes would have loved one particular scene in this movie (not a romantic one): mayyyyyybe, he was into that, but otoh he grew up near Haworth and had enough Bronte opionions of his own to write a poem about Emily (which ships Emily/the Wind, not Emily/a guy) and reference Emily in a poem about Sylvia Plath, so I am really not convinced he’d have liked this film. The script of which sounds as if it was written by Mr. Lockwood, based on his so very insightful inititial assumptions about the people at Wuthering Heights, and with this Wuthering Heights joke, I am ending this rant.
